Early this morning when I turned on my pc I face a bit weird issue. I am using Linux Mint 13 dual boot with Windows XP. The system turned on properly. I opened up a browser to check my mails. Later on I have a folder on my desktop. When I double clicked on it, nothing happned. All icons disappeared. Later on they appear automatically.

Again when I try to run Update Manager to check for new updates, the same thing happened. I am not able to understand what is happening to my pc. I cannot open any foder, view my files and perform some regular task. Software Manager is crashing. What I should I do here.

It looks you had played with Startup Applications. I face the same thing when I disabled a Theme associated service from Startup. I was not aware about the same. Launch Startup and enable all the services, reboot your system and check back.

It looks that the issue lies with Plymouth. This is the default theme manager in Linux Mint. If this has some issue then you might face the problem. While using Linux mint anumber of time I had seen a error. Suddenly while working the desktop crash and I can see a black screen saying disconnected from Plymouth. You can run update manager to get some fix on that or there is a possibility to re-install the same. You can do that from terminal. Before going in terminal and messing with commands go in Software Manager and try to locate certain Plymouth packages from it. Download all those are essential and done. Second thing mention the exact error that you are getting on Linux Mint.

It can be a error that would be related to some update package also. Do not add unnecessary themes and screensavers in your OS. Second run regular updates to fix such issue. I am working on Gnome Classic desktop which works faster and smoother and does not really crash like others.

Somehow this does not looks a theming issue to me. I face the same thing when my desktop did not load at all. I type the user id and password and then hit enter. There is a black screen and I am back to the login screen. I keep my backup on different partition. I re-install everything back again.

There is a recovery mode in grub bootloader. Simply do this, restart your pc and wait for grub to load. Once it appears the second option is Linux Mint (Recovery Mode). Hit that. You will see certain options on the screen. Once of them is repair broken packages. Select that option and wait for a while. You can press later on the first option which is Normal Mode to see your desktop. Remember that you are still in recovery mode.

This is just like Safe Mode of Linux. Backup your data or simply add remove packages from here. Then reboot and check back you can login to your desktop or facing any crash issue here. There is one more option that you can go for. At the time of login you can see a option of change session. Click on that, and choose MATE. If the desktop still not loads then click on Gnome Classic. But before that move your data to any internal partition so that you can access. I am not sure you are going to get your desktop files back on the screen.

I had switched to Gnome classic before the same issue. I was just playing around to add some themes and I do not remember what really happened. The screen does not load at all. It looks that Mate desktop is not stable enough.

I want to add something here. I face a error which is related to Samb4 shared resources. I do not know how it is related to Plymouth, but this error appears always when I run Update manager. Also when I try to troubleshoot packages through terminal I got the same thing. The error is -- E: samba4: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 126. Later on I tried to find the error solution on web. I found that when you run update manager, somehow Samba4 is installed in your system. If you are not willing to use network or file sharing on your system then you do not need it.

You can stick with Samba only. You can try to remove that from package or simply untick the same at the time of updates. It worked fine and nicely and did not create any issue. The command to remove Samba 4 from terminal is sudo apt-get --purge remove samba4. You can uncheck this option in future. When I removed this my system worked properly. It might help you out.

According to me Samba4 issue is not related with Plymouth. But some packages can affect your boot as they fail to load. You must check your system what all things are installed. Remove which you do not need.

I am using Ubuntu and never face this issue. Linux Mint is stable, but only when you do not customize it a lot. I face issue due to a mount drive. I am on Windows server and added my shared network drive on the desktop. This is mounted automatically. But on restart the Mint PC fails to locate the drive, as it needs the keyring to access network sources. I got a error on the screen saying that network does not load properly.

But the desktop appears anyhow. I think this is some kind of theming issue. You have to check the default themes. If possible try to use basic themes of change. If in regular mode it doe snot work then you can do the same in recovery mode. There is system restore type feature available in Linux Mint. It was the best option that had seen in windows and it worked well also.